At long last

Here I am back again like the proverbial bad penny lol. So much has been going on and we've been so busy since the last post I did way back in December.

As I said in my last post we were due to move on the 24th January, and we got there by the skin of our teeth. Despite my youngest daughter coming to help me pack in early January, we still didn't get it all done by a long chalk. In fact my oldest daughter and I were still packing on the day we moved !! I told Jim I wanted to pack the house up, because I know his idea of packing is to just throw things in boxes willy nilly. Whereas I would be filling every single inch of every box. Moving really is the most stressful thing ever ...... well it is when you live with a hoarder, which I do !! At one point my stress levels got so high, I almost threw the towel in, and gave up on mine and Jim's relationship ....that's how bad it got.

Thank goodness my family came and helped us move, there was no way we'd have moved all those boxes without them. We took very little furniture from the old house, as Jim's father in laws house had plenty of it's own and it was top of the range stuff. One surprising thing that threw us completely was getting rid of stuff to the tip. On Anglesey you just take it down the tip end of ..... here you have to get permits, and list exactly what stuff you're going to take, I've never heard of anything so stupid in all my life. After living in a house for 25yrs how the hell was Jim supposed to know exactly what he was going to throw away. It ended up with Jim's daughter and son in law taking a couple of loads for us in their car ( the only mode of transport you don't have to list everything ), and one of my sons taking a high top Transit van full to the roof, back down to the Midlands were he could get rid of it for us.

So now after 5 weeks, Jims still unpacking boxes, I decided not to help unpack much seeing as I packed it all up !! Besides which I'd run out of energy and couldn't be bothered. The kitchen ( my domain ) is done completely and looks lovely. The front room seems to go through various stages of almost being sorted, then Jim moves stuff round or brings stuff down from upstairs and it trashes it again, which drives me mad. But it's about livable in. The upstairs ...well that's a totally different story. Jim's method of unpacking is move everything out of one room, sort out a couple of boxes and then move everything back in there again. Does that make any sense to you .....no it doesn't to me either, but what can I do ? At least Jim makes sure that there's always a  pathway to our bed, which I'm very grateful for. But apart from that it's chaos up there, we've even got a mountain bike frame ( minus it's wheels ) sitting in the bath ( yes you read that right ) which has to be moved out every time I go in the shower grrrrr. Currently there's nowhere else for it to go, its worth too much money to go in the shed, it's too big to go in the attic where it's going to end up is a complete mystery to me. Sooner or later I'll lose my temper with Jim and it will find a permanent home though trust me.

On top of this Jim's also been having to deal with solicitors and the mound of paperwork of his father in laws estate. What a nightmare that's been, why the heck solicitors can't tell you what paperwork they need all at once, rather than asking for it in dribs and drabs is beyond me, but that's what they've been doing. Pretty much all of Johns estate was in various forms of investments with loads of different company's, and of course over the years, company's have changed hands, changed names etc etc, so tracing down these investments has been a nightmare, but its pretty much sorted out now thank goodness.

Despite my moaning I love this house and much to Jim's surprise he realised that the THOUGHT of moving house after 25 yrs, was much worse than the actual reality of it. The only thing I can't really get to grips with is cooking on gas, it's so fierce compared to electric which I've always cooked on, and even the very lowest of flames has saucepans boiling away madly !! Luckily we've got a slow cooker, and that's come into its own since we moved here. I pack it up with goodies first thing in the morning and leave it on low, it fills the house with delicious smells all day and by tea time we have some amazing meals. We've now also got a lovely table complete with candles we sit at and have our meals, which Jim really enjoys. It surprised me that he gets so much pleasure from this very conventional thing as Jim's the least conventional man I've ever met lol.

Now I've got a little bit of space to work in, I've started to do some new art work for here. The first thing being 3 round canvases which I've covered with modelling paste ( as I couldn't find my gesso) and used distress inks on it in various shades of orange and reds, blues and purple, and yellows and greens. each one will have a decoration on it, what kind I'm not quite sure yet, as it's a work in progress at the moment. But I'll share it with you when they're finished.